link between iraq & alqueda

“oh man, you liberals must be soo disappointed....


oh yeah, they found some chemicals and they got the dood in charge of lying to the UN inspectors too.....


and tha walls....come tumbling down.....


AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA! NANNY NANNY BOO BOO!

who will apologize to bush ? genine gerapalo?

BAAAHAHHAHAHAHHA!”

“I'd lie about lying for mercy,wouldn't you?”

“Was there really a doubt?”

“Strat, the liberals will say we planted the evidence. It's a no-win situation.”

“What do chemicals in Iraq have to do with Al Qaida?

Surely Iraq has some chemical weapons or components.

Strato, you should apologize to Bush for kissing his ass so vigorously when you hardly know the guy.”

“TT: There was reportedly a memo found indicating some kind of contact betwen AL Qeda and Iraq.

Still the meaning of the evidence isn't clear.

I've assumed that there are chemical weapons in Iraq and that Iraq has talked to Al Qeda. Practically everyone talks to everyone - friend or foe. The US gave Iraq intelligence about Iranian troop movements before and after Iraq used chemical weapons. The US gave arms to Iran after Iranian backed troops took US hostages.”

“That's not as bad as giving nuclear secrets and technology to the Chinese for campaign contributions like Klinton did.”

“Government shouldn't be run like a business. No one should get rich during or after public service. Republicans and Democrats are both guilty as hell of this. There should be term limits and the congress should never be able to vote to give themselves a raise.”

“Strat, you mean they found more pesticide?????????? Was there enough to spray my apple trees?

Now that the price of gas is beginning to fall I suppose the price of Miracle-Gro will sky rocket.”

“ohhh, we'll just see about that. history will be the judge....

pecker, term limits i'm all for. these guys need to go back and live in the world they create...”

“Anybody following the story of the Republican organizer in CA who was working for the FBI, sleeping with two FBI agents and giving info to China?

And it looks like she was part of launching the accusations at the Dems for playing footsie with the old People's Republic of China.”

“strat you dont even care about issues, you just make everything liberals vs conservatives. if a democrat said the sky was blue, youd swear up and down it was (commie) pink(o).”

“I've been watching that one ped. I would have posted about it here but I wouldn't want anyone to acuse me of GOP bashing or anything (perish the thought). BUT since you brought it up and PECKERdewd feels so strongly about it, here is the story UPI (of all outlets) ran on the case:

Exclusive: Senate asked to probe FBI case

By Nicholas M. Horrock
UPI Chief White House Correspondent
From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk
Published 4/25/2003 7:33 PM

WASHINGTON, April 25 (UPI) -- Sens. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., called Friday for a Senate inquiry into the latest FBI espionage scandal as the implications of the penetration of the bureau by an alleged Chinese spy spread to the 1996 presidential election campaign finance investigation, United Press International has learned.

According to congressional sources, the two prominent senators have written to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, asking for hearings on the growing crisis of espionage failures at the FBI.

The latest scandal involves a wealthy, 49-year-old California woman and major Republican Party contributor who the FBI said in a court affidavit was a "double agent," working for two decades for the FBI while secretly reporting to Beijing.

Katrina Leung was held without bail last week on charges of spying for Beijing while posing as an FBI informant for a super-secret FBI counter-intelligence team in California.

According to an FBI affidavit filed in support of an arrest warrant for Leung, she had sexual relations over decades with two senior FBI counter-intelligence agents and was able to obtain top-secret information and documents from them that she provided to the Ministry of State Security, the Chinese intelligence agency.

One of the agents, James J. Smith, a former supervisor in the Los Angeles office and her key FBI "handler" for two decades, was charged with gross negligence with national security documents. The other, William Cleveland, who is also retired, was a supervising agent and expert on Chinese intelligence in the San Francisco office. He is reportedly cooperating with investigators.

Neither could be reached for comment, but a lawyer for Leung has said she is innocent.

During the course of its investigations, UPI has been told:

-- Senate investigators in 1996 suspected Leung as being a conduit for secret Chinese government payments to the Republicans, but the committee, headed by former Tennessee Republican Sen. Fred Thompson, dropped the inquiry before a report could be written. "The money came out of Macao," said one former congressional investigator, and "was funneled through Taiwan."

-- At that time, Leung was a key FBI asset under the direction of Smith. UPI's source said that investigators for the Thompson committee "guessed" she was an FBI asset, because the bureau resisted letting her be interviewed.

-- At the same time Smith was supervising Leung, he was also the agent the FBI assigned to one of the key prosecutions of another aspect of the 1996 probe, the secret Chinese payments to the President Bill Clinton/Vice President Al Gore campaign. Smith was assigned to debrief Johnny Chung, who was secretly cooperating with the FBI and admitted feeding $400,000 to the Democratic campaigns. Chung had to be put under protective custody after word of his cooperation leaked to China. He was convicted of bank fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy involving campaign donations. Investigators want to know if Smith let Leung know about Chung's cooperation and she fed it to Beijing.

-- Some Senate investigators suspect that Leung was the Republican opposite number to Chung. She is a major contributor to GOP candidates, including, indirectly through political action groups, the 2000 campaign of President George W. Bush.

-- The disclosure that Leung might have been a double agent is "devastating" to the investigation of secret Chinese campaign contributions to Clinton/Gore, according to a former senior congressional investigator. He said congressional investigators relied on the guidance of FBI agents and "were confident in what we were told by the FBI Director Louis Freeh." Some 150 suspects in the case either fled or avoided prosecution, he said.

-- Senior FBI officials had known as early as 1991 that Leung was a double agent, according to an interview with former FBI agent I.C. Smith, who related how a crucial counter-intelligence mission to China in 1990 might have been compromised by Leung's deception. Smith said he made the trip with Cleveland, one of the two agents accused of having an affair with Leung.

-- Cleveland, the San Francisco senior FBI agent accused of a sexual relationship with Leung, became the security officer for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapons program after his retirement from the bureau in the 1993. Former agents said security at the laboratories might have been compromised.

-- Brian Sun, a prominent defense attorney of Asian descent, is representing Smith in this matter. He defended Johnny Chung in the Clinton case and several other suspects in the campaign financing scandal. His firm -- O'Neill, Lysaght & Sun -- also won freedom for Wen Ho Lee, a former Los Alamos nuclear scientist who was accused of espionage by the FBI. Espionage charges against Lee were dropped and he pleaded guilty to a much less serious offense -- using an unsecured computer to download national defense information -- and was sentenced to 278 days, the time that he had already served.

Last week, the Department of Justice told Congress that Leung might have compromised virtually every Chinese espionage case over two decades.

I.C. Smith, who is no relation to the Smith in the Leung case, said in 1990 that he had been detailed by the FBI to head a counter-intelligence team at the Department of State to assist the department in tightening up security against espionage in U.S. embassies in communist countries. This was after American Marines guarding the U.S. Embassy in Moscow had been "compromised" by female agents operating for the Soviet KGB.

Smith said Cleveland -- at that time a well-regarded FBI expert on counter-intelligence against the Chinese security services -- was assigned to accompany him to China. They visited the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and then flew to inspect security at a U.S. consulate in northeastern China near North Korea. While there, he and Cleveland encountered a Chinese man who had been a suspect in a major U.S. counter-intelligence investigation. The two American security officers thought it was a coincidence.

But in 1991, Cleveland called him and told him the chance meeting was no coincidence. "He said they knew we were coming and everything we were going to do," Smith recalled.

He said he now believes that the call from Cleveland followed an incident related in the FBI affidavit filed in court in Los Angeles. In the affidavit, the FBI said that in 1991, Cleveland discovered Leung was possibly a double agent when he listened to a tape of a wiretap where she was talking to her supervisor in the Chinese intelligence service. She is code-named "Luo" and her Chinese handler was "Mao."

Cleveland, the report said, called Smith in a panic, but Smith reassured him that he would take care of it. Several unidentified sources quoted by different media outlets reported that there was a meeting on the issue in May 1991 at FBI headquarters in Washington, but there are few details known. Nevertheless, Smith, who had a sexual relationship with the woman from the early 1980s to November, 2000, continued to supervise Leung until his retirement, the FBI affidavit said, and even provided her classified information after he left the bureau.

I.C. Smith told UPI that it would be extraordinary for the bureau not to take this into account and the senior officials who were at the meeting should be sought out and interviewed by federal investigators.

Leung's wealth and prominence were well-known in Los Angeles. She had received $1.7 million from the FBI. In 1995 and 1996, when she was making numerous political contributions, she was paid $1.2 million negotiating a deal that allowed Nortel Communications to do business in China. Using the name "Merry Glory" for the deal, prosecutors said, she received 3 percent of any contract she obtained.

Prosecutors opposed bail for Leung, noting that she had $872,000 in cash in the bank that could be used to flee with. She is also accused of falsifying a mortgage arrangement on her $1.4 million San Marino, Calif., home that made it appear she was paying a mortgage. But the payments, the government said, were to an entity that she and her husband controlled.

But it was the political contributions she made that attracted Senate investigators, UPI was told.

Though her 1995 and 1996 contributions have not been detailed, the American Reporter reviewed campaign records that showed she has given thousands of dollars to Republican candidates including, indirectly through political action groups, to President George W. Bush's 2000 campaign.

UPI link”

“well 2snoots, i believe the issue at hand would be the fact that ya'll said like 15 jillion times...there's no link, there's no proof of WMD's....


no issues here....just pretend that i don't exist, maybe i'll go away .... ......NAWWWT!


peddy, haven't heard that one...gotta link er sumpthin?”

“ummm...”

“just pretend that i don't exist, maybe i'll go away?”

“thanks viol man - I haven't reached any conclusions about that one - but it has me thinking. Just the idea of someone being paid off that massively by the FBI funneling money to a political party is worrisome.

I hadn't read about Thompson acting to help keep the wraps on that one.”

“at least everyone else has something intelligent to say, strat. youre so damn biased, everything you say has to be taken with a grain of salt. and, as usual, please feel free to miss my point and/or twist my words.”

“vIolInL

I think Strat overlapped you... I usually post while I am doing other things and sometimes end up starting a post 5 - 10 minutes after I start.”

“and ive never said there was no proof of wmd's. youve just decided that im a libber i dont side with you 100% and now youre lumping me in with them. that terrorist training camp they found in iraq, with the old jet fuselage was enough for me. specific ties to al-quaeda? maybe, maybe not. specific ties to terrorism. you betcha. i just dont get in a lather about pointing out who is wrong and who is right.”

“but i do like needling you.”

“I thought the terrorist training camp was in Kurdish/US controlled territory - not in territory controlled by Saddam Hussein.”

“they didnt mention it when i saw that report. would we have even been fighting in kurdish controlled area?”

“no...see...they found documents with bin laden's name on them and they were pertaining to a week long visit by al queada brass in 98....


vioLIN and peddy, if this pans out, i hope they fry that girls butt and anyone else involved, no matter what party they are in.”

“well, i havent seen the news this weekend, but it wouldnt surprise me. hussein is an evil man without a conscience. but no one should apologize to bush, not even the dixie chicks. this is a free country. we are free to doubt and criticize our government and our president.”

“are you free to be wrong? to do him political harm without correcting your actions? i dont' even know if it was you or not, but lots of folks on here have said alot of negative things about this war and bush and this prooves they were dead wrong. free speech is great. free lying shouldn't be tolerated or left uncorrected. that's all i'm doing....give the guy credit for once.....


now just admit it, stratdewd was right....AGAIN....”

“you werent right about anything. you were just toeing the party line.”

“if gore had won the election and we went to war against iraq, youd be saying what a waste of money, we dont have enough proof, all the american lives lost, we got enough problems at home, etc. anything to make the democratic president look bad.”

“2scoops: there was a dissident Kurdish group with probable links to Al-Queda in the Kurdish area of Iraq (in the US protected zone) - the mainstream Iraqi Kurds, with US help shut them down.

Strat: Bush still looks likely to be wrong to me.

One simple irrefutable thing is: No chemical or bio weapons were used as Saddam and boys went down. No big cache yet found.

If US intelligence was so good - and if the threat was so imminent: the Iraqis would have tried to use them before going down and the US would have found them.

Some people jess can't see when they've been had.

G'night and sweet dreams
(oops - I fergot, you been dreamin right here on this page)”

“"One simple irrefutable thing is: No chemical or bio weapons were used as Saddam and boys went down. No big cache yet found."

good point there. and the spin from the right is ?”

“but then, ive always understood this as we wanted to take him down BEFORE iraq became really dangerous. so all the arguments iraq is or isnt an imminent threat are moot, and kind of takes the wind out of the sails of the left and the right.”

“Al Who???...”

“One problem 2scoops, war is a last resort. Imminent threat is the only justification for war.”

“Of course I wasn't addressing the rightness of the war - just the accuracy of what we were being told about inspections, and the chemical and biological weapons. Obviously the US intelligence was not nearly as precise as advertised and the inspections were far more on target.

I also have to agree on imminent threat. Kennedy stood tall and stuck true to the principle that the US would not start a war, even when there were nuke off the coast. WMD were there and the means to get them into the US were there.

Kennedy also was very clear that the US should never force a nation into war by attempts to humiliate it. This is important to remember as we watch the North Korean stand off unfold.”

“While I am on the subject of JFK:

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought"
JFK”

“Doing political harm to Lil' Georgie?

Wow, am I that good?”

“im not justifying or defending it, dom, that was just my understanding. maybe i misunderstood.”

“im not justifying or defending it, dom, that was just my understanding. maybe i misunderstood.”

“NY Times is reporting that the "supposed barrels" are not WMD.”

“When it comes to politics clarity is something that must be avoided at all cost 2scoops.... :}”

“ok look....they caught the guy IN CHARGE of lying to the UN. he has already told them that they were flimflamming the inspectors the whole time. he has told the US that iraq had thousands of warheads, made tons and tons of liquid anthrax.....on and on. more will be revealed soon, you'lll see....


scoops, and you'de be saying what a great president gore was....

ped, there is a link to alqueada....read it again....a link to alqueada....ok? do you see? there is the proof....it's a done deal mang......this seems so simple to me, why do you people squirm so? how could hussein use weapons that he spent 12 years denying owning? he couldn't.”

“lmao fatherG! STFU!”

“US finds Iraqis in Iraq”

“OMG! I KNEW IT!


SEE!?!?!??!?!”

“Iraq talked to Al Qeda - heck the US talked to Bin Laden and most of Al Qeda. Who would have believed that Iraqi officials and Bin Laden's people never talked at all?

The question - for those who do not carry rocket packs to help them fly to conclusions - mere leaping is insufficient here - is what did they talk about and what did they do together?

Israeli Mossad people have talked to people in Hamas and Hizbollah. Would it make sense to say "Hamas and Hizbollah have links to Israel?" I doubt it, unless you can show me evidence of specific acts of cooperation.”

“Here's what I see: 45 posts on this thread and no story about Saddam and al Qaida... No link to a story about Saddam and al Qaida. Is this just another of Stratdewd's



?”

“Ok, this goes back up the thread a bit - but can someone please explain where the insult is in calling Clinton - Klinton?”

“I'm guessing they think it's some kind of Socialist reference, when in fact it makes them look childish and functionally illiterate.”

“"They" had better find something quick, or I'm afraid stratdewd might crack up.”

“Too Late!

LOL”